Monday, August 26, 2013

Exodus: Proxima Centauri revised edition

Wow, it's been more than one month since our last post... time passed so quickly. We have not been on holidays. on the contrary, we spent almost 100% of our time on the re-print of Exodus: Proxima Centauri.

The first edition sold out on our level and with most of the distributors sometime in March and since then we turned down several orders of a several hundred copies. We thought that it would be impossible or, at least, financially suicidal to print this game again, without any quality issues. But, in everyone's life comes a time when you decide to think outside the box. And that is exactly what happened to us when we decided to make a revised edition. We kept the major concepts in place, but we went on and made changes in the graphic design and the ergonomics of the game, based on gamers' feedback and our own sessions of play-testing. We started with a clear goal in mind: a revised edition with better game play, less fiddliness and more sci-fi look and with top quality components.

The front of the box

To make sure that the quality is what we expected it to be, we requested offers only from manufacturing companies with a proven record of delivering the best and we made it part of the plan to check the quality throughout the entire production process.

With all that in mind, we started a long process of analyzing and rethinking every component in the game. As we progressed, every component which we considered final underwent a graphic design upgrade and found its place on one of the 15 punchboards in the game.

New planet hex

At the same time, we chose the manufacturing company. We chose to produce the game in Poland, so that we can stick to our promise - controlling the quality every step of the way. Together with them we looked for and found solutions to every problem we encountered on the way.

For example, inspired by other recent games, we decided to replace the thick paper player boards with 2mm cardboard. This would allow better marking of the technologies and reduce the risk of ruining the game in the middle. With the old player boards, one little lack of attention could cause big trouble, with one swift movement a player could swipe all the technology cubes from his player board and then take a long time trying to figure out what had he previously researched. With the new boards, the wooden cubes go in the player board, reducing the risk of such an event.